- The quality or condition of being sane; soundness of mind.
- Soundness of judgment or reason.
[Middle English sanite, health, from Old French, from Latin sānitās, from sānus, healthy.]
sanity
Dictionary:
san·i·ty (săn'ĭ-tē)  |
n.
| Thesaurus: sanity |
| Antonyms: sanity |
n
Definition: mental health; soundness of judgment
Antonyms: craziness, insanity, instability, madness, unsoundness
| Law Encyclopedia: Sanity |
This entry contains information applicable to United States law only.
Reasonable understanding; sound mind; possessing mental faculties that are capable of distinguishing right from wrong so as to bear legal responsibility for one's actions.
| Quotes About: Sanity |
Quotes:
"Sanity is the lot of those who are most obtuse, for lucidity destroys one's equilibrium: it is unhealthy to honestly endure the labors of the mind which incessantly contradict what they have just established."
- Georges Bataille
"No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions."
- Henry Ward Beecher
"What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation."
- Anatole France
"Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you."
- Carl Jung
"In a mad world, only the mad are sane."
- Akiro Kurosawa
"What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?"
- Ursula K. LeGuin
See more famous quotes about Sanity
| Wikipedia: Sanity |
For other uses, see Sanity (disambiguation).
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This article only describes one highly specialized aspect of its associated subject. Please help improve this article by adding more general information. (September 2009) |
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This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2007) |
Sanity (san′ə tē, from Latin: sānitās) refers to the soundness, rationality and reasonableness of the human mind. A person is sane (sān) if they are rational. In modern society, the terms have become exclusively synonymous with compos mentis (Latin: compos, having mastery of, and mentis, mind), in contrast with non compos mentis, or insane.
Legal status
In criminal and mental health law, sanity is a legal term denoting that an individual is of sound mind and therefore can bear legal responsibility for his or her actions. The official legal term is compos mentis. It is generally defined in terms of the absence of insanity (non compos mentis). It is not a medical term, although the opinions of medical experts are often important in making a legal decision as to whether someone is sane or insane. It is also not the same concept as mental illness. One can be acting under profound mental illness and yet be sane, and one can also be ruled insane without an underlying mental illness.
Sanity outside of legal definitions has been little explored by science and medicine, as the concentration has been on illness. Dr. P.S. Graven suggested the term "un-sane" to describe a condition that is not exactly insane, but not quite sane either.
A theory of sanity was proposed by Alfred Korzybski in his general semantics. He believed that sanity was tied to the structural fit or lack of it between our reactions to the world and what is actually going on in the world. He expressed this notion in a map-territory analogy: "A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness." Given that science continually seeks to adjust its theories structurally to fit the facts, i.e., adjusts its maps to fit the territory, and thus advances more rapidly than any other field, he believed that the key to understanding sanity would be found in the study of the methods of science (and the study of structure as revealed by science). The adoption of a scientific outlook and attitude of continual adjustment by the individual toward his or her assumptions was the way, so he claimed. In other words, there were "factors of sanity to be found in the physico-mathematical methods of science."
In his classic book, The Sane Society, published in 1955, psychologist Erich Fromm proposed that, not just individuals, but entire societies "may be lacking in sanity". Fromm argued that one of the most deceptive features of social life involves consensual validation[1]:
| “ | It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas or feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing is further from the truth... Just as there is a 'Folie à deux' there is a 'folie à millions.' The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.[2] | ” |
See also
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Look up sane or sanity in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
References
- ^ Consensual validation at vault-co[dead link]
- ^ Fromm, Erich. The Sane Society, Routledge, 1955, pp.14–15.
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
| Translations: Sanity |
Dansk (Danish)
n. - tilregnelighed, fornuft, forstand
Nederlands (Dutch)
(geestelijke) gezondheid, gezond verstand
Français (French)
n. - équilibre mental, rectitude
Deutsch (German)
n. - geistige Gesundheit
Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - πνευματική υγεία
Italiano (Italian)
sanità di mente
Português (Portuguese)
n. - sanidade mental (f)
Русский (Russian)
нормальная психика, здравый ум, душевное равновесие, разумность, здравый смысл
Español (Spanish)
n. - cordura, sensatez, juicio
Svenska (Swedish)
n. - mental hälsa, själslig sundhet, sunt omdöme
中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
神智健全, 健全, 头脑清楚
中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 神智健全, 健全, 頭腦清楚
한국어 (Korean)
n. - 제정신, 판단의 건전함, (육체적인) 건강
العربيه (Arabic)
(الاسم) سلامه ألعقل أو صحته
עברית (Hebrew)
n. - שפיות, שיקול-דעת
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Copyrights:
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 | Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Thesaurus. Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary Copyright © 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Antonyms. © 1999-2009 by Answers Corporation. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Law Encyclopedia. West's Encyclopedia of American Law. Copyright © 1998 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Quotes About. Copyright © 2005 QuotationsBook.com. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Sanity". Read more |
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| Translations. Copyright © 2007, WizCom Technologies Ltd. All rights reserved. Read more |
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